Mark S. asked ... > Perhaps with your background you could explain Zettelkasten. There seems > to be an almost cult-like culture around a system of taking notes (by > software or index cards). https://zettelkasten.de/ . >
Mark S. asked me that interesting question in another thread, started by Mat, comparing TW to other "similar software". I been thinking about Mark's question. I wasn't sure if people here are interested in this, but then I thought well, hey, they might be ... "Zettelkästen" is just the German for "card indices" in general. https://zettelkasten.de/ is a specific "Zettelkästen Methodology" derived from the work done originally (on physical cards) by the brilliant prolific sociologist and systems theorist Niklas Luhmann. He was one of several social scientists who prefigured issues that would come up in the development of software for "soft data" and "emergent structure". The point being that in the social sciences, a lot of the time, theories/patterns emerge during research, so you need flexibility--its not like hard science which is more driven by strict prior hypotheses that have clear "data slots"--nor is it like birth & death records, nor address books etc. In short, social science (especially ideographic fieldwork) needs an "open" way to record information. The PRACTICAL issue for the Luhmann style Zettelkästeners, in software, was (1) how to maintain the integrity of the record (the card) AND (2) relate that record to other records (the cards) in an EMERGENT way. In other words NOT be a strict database that only had determined prior slots (hypothesised significant). At the time of emergence of such work it was a hot issue. The "Zettelkästen Methodology" is interesting and clearly is still used to good effect. Not so remarked upon, but significant, is that quite a lot of the sense-making in it is EXTERNAL to the computer. Its about guesses external to the data itself to find pattern. Luhmann make two Zettelkästen (manual, physical) in his life, with thousands of records each, and they informed and structured most all of his voluminous writing. It worked. But I'm not convinced it worked without HIM doing "in head" most of the cross-connection work. Zettelkästen Methodology now looks a bit like a "blast from the past" ... I mean the oft discussion of the vitality of "Tags" OVER "Topics/Categories" is already a done deal on the net nowadays. So in that sense its a bit like a Philosophy of Knowledge that's done it job already. --- On the comparison of TiddlyWiki and Card Indices ... which OFTEN users point to and celebrate ... well it works for SOME TiddlyWiki set up that way. No harm in using that analogy. BUT the analogy quickly breaks down. Card Index systems (& computer equivalents) are base on *the sacredness of the record (Card)* whilst TiddlyWiki is based on the *equality of the fragment (Tiddler)*. So what in the Zettelkästen Methodology is seen as a "basic unit" (card), in TiddlyWiki might also be a card, but could also be composed of fragments (Tiddlers), decomposed and reassembled multiple ways. Zettelkästen Methodology also has no conceptual way of dealing with "the software itself" and "the organisational system itself" being also equal components. In Zettelkästen Methodology you have Cards, then an external software framework to organise them. These are not distinct in TiddlyWiki. IMO, a Tiddler is hardly an "index card" at all in any normal sense. Its outstanding characteristic is its a CHAMELEON :-). --- FWIW, to give some perspective to this issue, the "card analogy" actually owes its greatest realisation in computing to stricter database structures. The Index Card as an idea probably got its first airing in the 1640s in Harrison's "The Ark Of Studies". Serious early application was by Linnaeus to be able to organise the taxonomy of species in a flexible way where records could be added and re-ordered at will (1760's). Then the Dewey library card index system (1870's) was very significant, which was widely adopted, with Index Cards beginning to be adopted widely for all sorts of purposes--police records, doctors records, address "books" etc. A big step towards computing was the development of index cards with punched holes at their edges that were then "notched" into when the card was in a "category". Say you had a thousand cards and only wanted to see cards about "cats" ... you threaded a slim long knitting needle through the "cat hole" and then you could lift off all the records that were not for cats to just see cats (basic filtering). A bunch of different mechanical systems for doing this were developed of varying degrees of sophistication. These "Knitting Needle Machines" were conceptually important to the later development of *relational databases*. Extending from the needle hole idea, a next step was to replace the data recorded on the body of the cards with punched holes on the card--the "punch card"--made on a kind of typewriter. Data that previously were in written language became holes. These could be analysed by mechanical devices that fed the cards through a kind of pianola that notched up a count for when there was a hole. In turn, all this partly fostered punch-tape that in early "on-line" computing WAS your computer program... you'd feed it into a machine and it would transmit signals to a remote computer (they were all remote at the start) according to the pattern of holes. The Punch-Hole Index Card metaphorically matched BINARY thinking vital to early computing to do with fundamental "gates" ... that could convey information as "1" (hole), "0" (no-hole), or on computer as "signal on", "signal off". So, overall, the Card Index was pretty central to concepts of organised knowledge first, and computer realisation of that knowledge, later. An important social and technological bridge from the past to now. But I don't think metaphorically TiddlyWiki has other than a quite generic relationship to card indices. No more than many ordinary programs do. Best wishes Josiah -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to tiddlywiki@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/7587a70c-b308-49c3-8645-f76698606487%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
